My friend jp hates needles. He’s the one I enjoyed showing my insulin needles to last semester: I liked watching him wriggle as I waved a needle in front of him and talked about how little the injections hurt.

I flinched once while using a particularly blunt lancet to check my sugar. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I only flinched a little too.”

Soon he was describing the infamous murder in the shower from Hitchcock’s Psycho, only I was the murderer and my Fastclix lancet was the murder weapon. Also, the scene now lasted for 30 minutes.

It’s become running joke of sorts. I pull out my lancet to check my sugar and the next thing I know I’m in the middle of scene 1, take 3 of Pyschobetic.

And I’m left wondering–how long would that scene have lasted if a lancet had been used as the murder weapon?

As helpful as nutrition apps like Go Meals are, what I really want is carb vision, the ability to tell the number of carbs in any given food item just by looking at it. It’s like x-ray vision for people with diabetes.

After watching a number of super hero films and discussing this topic many times with friends, I’ve come up with the following list of ways to develop carb vision.

If you shamelessly stalk your blog’s statistics the way I do, you may know that WordPress furnishes bloggers with a list of search terms that have led readers to their blog. More experienced, committed bloggers may use this information to fine-tune blog posts to better reach their targeted audience. I just read the search queries and laugh. Stairs clip art? Someone found my blog by googling stairs? (I’ve also learned that most of my blog traffic comes from people searching for clip art and for pictures of “nasty looking feet.” Unfortunately for them, my feet aren’t nasty looking.)

I think this phrase could use a strategically placed comma, some capitalization and an exclamation point. Eat dinner, clip art! Eat your food, you fat lard! The question is, can clip art eat dinner?

explaining clip art

Explaining your clip art can be difficult, especially to those who don’t have clip art themselves. Clip art is simply a royalty-free image created for decorating badly designed power points and webpages in the deluded hopes that images will make boring content more interesting. By taking charge of your clip art, you can still live a happy, full life. Limiting yourself to one clip art per slide, blog post, or webpage is the first step in learning to control your clip art.

keep calm jonas brothers

I would freak out too if I knew that middle school girls had pictures of my face plastered on their backpacks and pillowcases. But panicking isn’t going to help anything.

i tried being normal once and i didn’t like it

I didn’t either, dude. I didn’t either.

flavored lotion

I find this concept disturbing. Deeply disturbing.

look foot

Someone should write a Dick and Jane book containing this sentence. “Look, Jane! See foot. See foot run.”

friends eating clip art

You know, food tastes better than clip art.

diabetic complications

You can find a list of the most commonly known complications on medical websites. Here are some lesser known ones:

Addiction to Coke Zero

Addiction to Twitter

Addiction to blogs

Addiction to blogging

Excessive use of jargon in day-to-day conversation

While research demonstrates that tight blood sugar management greatly lowers the risk of the most commonly known diabetes complications, it has shown little to no effectiveness in preventing these lesser known complications.

****

Well, that’s it for the first edition of “The Great Google Has Spoken.” I hope to create a recurring series out of future search terms. Google on, my readers. Google on.

When I talk about diabetes, I feel like everything I say sounds like it was run through YouTube’s close caption feature. Meaning that everything I say sounds like gibberish. You don’t speak diabetese too?

What I Say: I was running a bit high, so I decided to change out my infusion set. Bent cannula. Ouch.

What I Meant: My blood sugar was high, so I decided to change the infusion set, the part that attaches to me. (Yes, it attaches to me. No, it doesn’t really hurt.) When I pulled it out (no, it didn’t hurt), I noticed that the cannula, a flexible tube, was bent so I wasn’t getting enough insulin. No, I don’t know where the insulin goes when the cannula is bent. Yes, I guess it is sort of bad but I’m not going to die.

What They Hear: I was gunning a bit of pie, so guy rewrited to change out my infuriating pet. Bent cannoli. Ouch.

[I admit it: the video has nothing to do with diabetes. But it is marginally connected with my post and it is really funny.]